Duty to the Crown
by Zeda
Summary: Cronos sits alone in his room and contemplates the pain inherent in being forced to betray his own people. (R and R, Please!)


( -...- = italics)  
  
Title: Duty to the Crown  
  
Author: Zeda (BLK)  
  
Started: September 13th, 2003 Ended: September 13th, 2003  
  
Series: Bloody Roar  
  
Rating: PG  
  
Warnings: Angsting. Lots of angsting  
  
Summary: Cronos sits alone in his room and contemplates the pain inherent in being forced to betray his own people.  
  
Disclaimer: I DO NOT own Bloody Roar. Nope, not at all  
  
Comments go to Zeda at Bkoe101725@aol.com  
  
MY SITE: http://www.geocities.com/ee_bryaoi  
  
*  
  
It didn't seem fair to him. Not fair at all.  
  
The young man sat at his bedroom window in total silence, overlooking the vast kingdom below him as it sprawled across the land, seeming to reach with yearning to the horizon line that its borders could not definitely reach. The bleak heaviness of this, his world, held a very rigid sort of grace to its carved marble shapes. A sense of yearning smothered under a thick and inescapable fog of discontent. The castle's design had been heavily influenced both by Indian architecture (an ode to the lineage of his family, the founders of the Zoanthrope Kingdom) and an integration of key elements of design in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The stretch of stone stairs and walls and street seemed to go on forever with little need for the lush touch that plants gave, an unending sea of solid rigidity and a steely refusal to allow any of natures virtues and flaws in. From his vantage point he could see the hidden inner gardens of lower levels; the small points so like a series of oasis in the bleak desert of concrete and stone spread before him.   
  
These small points of life and nature amid the rigidness of the surrounding world could have had a poetic significance; perhaps been a symbolic representation of himself and the world around him. However, these little things went unnoticed in the flurry of his stressed and painful musings. His mind was a jumble of badly knotted inclinations, trapped feelings and the anguish of simply having no way to escape the fate he so detested. He wasn't free . . . He was incapable of protecting his fellow Zoanthropes. Though he did not personally know any of the people that walked and lived and breathed in the homes below the palace walls and steps, he felt a deep sense of devotion to them. He was their prince, responsible for their well being and happiness. The people had entrusted his father, as their King, with their lives and he was the prince, equally entrusted, equally responsible.  
  
And here he was, unable to keep his father from betraying that sacred trust and using his own people for these ghastly experiments. Forced to be his father's puppet by sense of devotion to the very man that used him. He could not deny his father, his king . . . and he could not help his precious people.  
  
The young man turned his head just faintly, glancing to the large double doors of his bedchambers. Beyond that door, his bodyguard was standing vigil. Under the pretense of keeping him safe, in reality keeping him bound within the prison of his room. He was indeed bound, helpless and useless within the confines of his room. No escape, no way to end the suffering of another man or woman betrayed and forced into the laboratories in the basement . . .  
  
Those poor people had been betrayed. Their trust in the King, his father, and in himself . . . so terribly ruined in the wake of all that was to be done to them. It amounted to an awful tightening in his ribs. It amounted to a mind left to stew with guilt and pain and loathing and bitterness, boiling and seething inside of him, hurting his heart. He felt so wretched, so vile in his inability to keep them safe. The young man felt it, the deep and constant pain within his mind and heart. It was a pain very different from that he had suffered during his own experimentation . . .  
  
Yes, even he had been betrayed. And he found that the most tragic fact was that he still loved his father despite it all. He still loved that man, his King and father, even after he had been taken away to the labs himself in order to have his fluctuating beast form 'balanced out' by the geneticists and scientists that worked covertly many storied below the kingdom's streets. It had hurt; oh god had it hurt . . . His skin still seethed in agony at the very memory of needles and tubes, razors and electrical shocks. But he had been through significantly less pain than the others still trapped below ground, in that man-made hell his father kept secret from their devoted people.  
  
Whether his treason would be pardoned or not, he -had- to end the suffering of his kingdom. But . . . He was trapped. More thoroughly trapped by his duties and lineage and the confines of these powerful stone walls than anybody could seem to imagine. He was a puppet, scorned and despised for lacking the power to break free from his own strings.   
  
If only his mother was still with them . . . His mother, a faded memory from his earliest inclinations of childhood, with her powerful yet gentle silhouette; her warm golden eyes that reflected a deep love for him . . . Her memory dulled the swarming pains in his skull and gave him a sense of solace amid the horrors of his reality. As long as he could keep her face in his mind, he knew that he could endure the greatest pain and eventually rise, like the phoenix that was the icon of his lineage, to the throne and end the travesties inflicted on his people.  
  
He could rise, someday, above his own duty.  
  
But then the door to his bedchamber opened, and he was compelled to his greatest sorrow yet. Ganesha looked to him, eyes steely in his aged skull as he greeted the prince, still seated at his windowsill.  
  
"Prince Cronos, it is time for the Tournament,"  
  
*  
  
End. ^_^" If you enjoyed my fic, please come to my Bloody Roar Shrine!: http://www.geocities.com/ee_bryaoi 


End file.
